Humanoid 2015

Tamim Asfour is full Professor at the Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He is chair of Humanoid Robotics Systems and head of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T). His current research interest is high performance humanoid robotics. He is developer and leader of the development team of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has been active in the field of Humanoid Robotics for the last 14 years resulting in about 150 peer-reviewed publications with focus on engineering complete humanoid robot systems including humanoid mechatronics and mechano-informatics, grasping and dexterous manipulation, action learning from human observation, goal-directed imitation learning, active vision and active touch, whole-body motion planning, system integration, robot software and hardware control architecture. He received his diploma degree in Electrical Engineering in 1994 and his PhD in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of Karlsruhe.

Kensuke Harada received his B.S., M.S., and Doctoral degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Kyoto University in 1992, 1994, and 1997, respectively. He worked as a Research Associate at Hiroshima University from 1997 to 2002. From 2002, he has been working at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). For one year from 2005 to 2006, he was a visiting scholar at the computer science department of Stanford University, Currently, he is a leader of the vision and manipulation research group. His research interest includes mechanics and control of robot manipulators and robot hands, biped locomotion, and motion planning of robotic systems. He is a member of IEEE, JSME, RSJ, and SICE

Abderrahmane Kheddar received the BS in Computer Science degree from the Institut National d’Informatique (INI), Algiers, the MSc and Ph.D. degree in robotics, both from the University of Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is presently Directeur de Recherche at CNRS and the Director of the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotic Laboratory (JRL), UMI3218/RL, Tsukuba, Japan. He is also leading the Interactive Digital Humans (IDH) team at CNRS-University of Montpellier LIRMM, France. His research interests include haptics, humanoids and recently thought-based control using brain machine interfaces. He is a founding member of the IEEE/RAS chapter on haptics (acting also as a senior advisor), the co-chair and founding member of the IEEE/RAS Technical committee on model-based optimization, Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and within the editorial board of some other related robotics journals; he is a founding member of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics and served in its editorial board during three years (2007-2010). He is an IEEE senior member and titular full member of the National Academy of Technology of France.

Francesco Nori was born in Padova in 1976. He received his D.Eng. degree (highest honors) from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2002. During the year 2002 he was a member of the UCLA Vision Lab as a visiting student under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Soatto, University of California Los Angeles. During this collaboration period he started a research activity in the field of computational vision and human motion tracking. In 2003 Francesco Nori started his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Ruggero Frezza at the University of Padova, Italy. During this period the main topic of his research activity was modular control with special attention on biologically inspired control structures. Francesco Nori received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2005. In the year 2006 he moved to the University of Genova and started his PostDoc at the laboratory for integrated advanced robotics (LiraLab) , beginning a fruitful collaboration with Prof. Giorgio Metta and Prof. Giulio Sandini. In 2007 Francesco Nori has moved to the Italian Institute of technology where he is currently hired as a team leader.

Christian Ott received his doctoral degree in Automatic Control from the University of Saarland, Germany, in 2005. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Twente and worked as a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. Currently he is the head of the department for Analysis and Control of Advanced Robotic Systems in the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). His main research interests are the application of nonlinear control methods to robotic systems, force and impedance control, and control of bipedal humanoid robots.

Jaeheung Park received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1995 and 1999, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University, U.S. in 2006. From 2006 to 2009, He was a Post-doctoral researcher and later a Research Associate at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 2007 to 2008, he worked part-time at Hansen Medical Inc., a medical robotics company in U.S. Since 2009, he has been a professor (now associate professor) in the department of Intelligent Convergence Systems at Seoul National University, Korea. His research interests lie in the areas of robot-environment interaction, contact force control, robust haptic teleoperation, multicontact control, whole-body dynamic control, biomechanics, and medical robotics.

Dr. Sentis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin since 2010. He received his Ph.D and M.S. degrees from Stanford University where he was also a Postdoctoral Fellow. He was awarded the La Caixa Graduate Studies award from Europe's leading savings bank. He holds a B.S. (Honors Thesis) degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). He worked in Silicon Valley as a Control Systems Engineer where he programmed Fanuc Robots for the Clean Room Automation Industry. In Austin, he directs the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, an 1100 sqft laboratory with 3 Research Fellows, 6 PhD Students, 1 MS Student, several Undergraduate Students, and 2 humanoid robots. He was the UT Lead for DARPA's Robotics Challenge entry with NASA Johnson Space Center in 2013. His research focuses on whole-body compliant control of human centered robots, safe physical human robot interaction, building and controlling Series Elastic Actuators, mobile manipulation in rough terrains, and phase space motion planning for bipedal locomotion. In his laboratory he and his personnel have built two compliant humanoid robots and created a set up for studies on bipedal rough terrain locomotion and manipulation. His research has been funded by the Office of Naval Research, NASA, DARPA, Hong Kong's AAA Electronics and Willow Garage. He has over 50 peer-reviewed Journal, Thesis and Conference publications, gathering 1207 scientific citations, and an i10 index factor of 18.

Russ is the X Consortium Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, the Director of the Center for Robotics at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and the leader of Team MIT's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow. Russ received his B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004, working with Sebastian Seung. After graduation, he joined the MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department as a Postdoctoral Associate. During his education, he has also spent time at Microsoft, Microsoft Research, and the Santa Fe Institute.